'Daredevil: Born Again' Two-Episode Premiere Brings Death and (You Guessed It!) Rebirth

Daredevil: Born Again debuted on Disney+ last night with two episodes, and I’ll admit I didn’t get my hopes up for the premiere. The show comes with a lot of baggage: Originally conceived as a lighter reboot of the character already featured in a successful three-season Netflix show (and keeping the same lead actor, Charlie Cox), MCU head honcho Kevin Feige reportedly was unhappy with the direction the series was taking and had the reboot rebooted to be a direct continuation of the Netflix series instead. Given all the highly publicized reshuffling and Marvel Studio’s unreliable track record of late, I wasn’t exactly holding my breath expecting them to thread the needle on this new/old Daredevil. So I’m delighted to say that so far, they kinda did. Though not without some sacrifice.

The first episode of the premiere, titled “Heaven’s Half-Hour,” kicks off with a sequence that’s equal parts mission statement, over-the-top silliness, and heartbreak. Just like old times, Matt is at a bar with Foggy (Elden Henson) and Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) during a retirement party for an NYPD officer named Cherry (Homicide’s Clark Johnson, everybody!). Then Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) lures our trio outside and snipers Foggy. Matt dons his horns and takes the fight to a series of hallways, natch, and then up onto a rooftop where he gains the upper hand just in time to hear Foggy’s heartbeat stop. In his grief, Matt throws Bullseye off the roof, though the villain doesn’t die (probably due to whatever mad science reconstructed him after the events of Daredevil season 3). The whole thing is so on-the-nose (Matt, Karen, and Foggy even joke about “nostalgia” on their walk to the bar), but the honey-sweet vibe leading into screaming despair feels like the right pitch, honestly. It’s heightened, like a comic book should be, but it’s also a middle-ground between the grittiness of the Netflix version and the lighter tone hinted at by Daredevil and Kingpin’s other appearances in the MCU. The sequence bridges a gap while setting Matt up for a new chapter in his life.

That new chapter? More lawyering! A year-long time jump finds Matt practicing law with a new partner named Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James). Karen has bailed to San Francisco, and Matt bailed on life as a vigilante, choosing instead to focus on helping people the way Foggy always wanted. Tragedy and guilt have always been the forces that drove Matt Murdock, but it seems this time he’s finally channeling them to pull himself out of the darkness instead of driving him further in. And speaking of turning over a new leaf, Matt hears some surprising news: Wilson Fisk is back and running for Mayor of New York City. When Matt confronts Fisk, it seems his old nemesis is also sincere in his own attempt to go straight. That’s the jumping-off point for Daredevil: Born Again, then: Two men used to operating outside of the law, each committing to upholding it and leaving their alter-egos behind.

With that table-setting out of the way, episode two (“Optics”) immediately challenges that commitment to law-abiding peace for both men. Fisk finds that his popularity with the people doesn’t translate to popularity within the city government, especially with the police force. The police commissioner openly despises the former Kingpin (who, in case you’ve forgotten, once crushed a man’s head with his bare hands) and plans to resign without notice — knowing that will lead half the NYPD to follow suit. So Fisk leverages his reputation to imply a threat to the commissioner’s family, and voila! Suddenly, everybody is willing to play ball. He didn’t exactly get his hands dirty, but Fisk didn’t resolve the situation in an entirely above-board fashion either — and he can’t expect to rely on empty threats forever.

Matt, meanwhile, takes on an interesting case: A good samaritan named Hector Ayala intervened in a beatdown on a subway platform, only to discover the attackers were plainclothes police officers — and one of them fell in front of a train and was killed. The victim ran away, and Hector was arrested as a cop slayer. The fact that Hector is also a vigilante known as the White Tiger is information Matt successfully lobbies the judge into barring from the prosecution’s case since he was out of costume and had no special powers during the fight. Matt still needs to locate the intended victim in order to prove Hector’s innocence, which he does by following the cops who are still out looking for him. The end of the episode finds Matt facing the cops alone in the victim’s apartment and allowing those cops to beat him without fighting back. But when the cops decide to murder him (despite knowing he’s the defense attorney in Ayala’s case!), he finally decides to fight back … brutally. He may not have officially donned his horns again yet, but there’s no mistaking that Daredevil made a return in this fight based on the sheer number of broken bones.

Oh, also? The cops were shown sporting Punisher skull tattoos, not unlike the misappropriation of the logo with real-life law enforcement types. Jon Bernthal is already confirmed to appear in Daredevil: Born Again (and will have his own stand-alone “special feature” coming to Disney+), so I’m curious how deep this tattoo business will run, plot-wise — and if this series will have better luck navigating the real world politics of it than Netlix’s Punisher series ever did.

The only other thing to really hit on is, naturally, looooooove. With Karen out of the picture, Kirsten sets up Matt with a therapist named Heather Glenn, and the two end up hitting it off (even though he really could use her professional help, just saying). What Matt doesn’t know is that Heather is also working as a couples counselor for Wilson Fisk and his wife, Vanessa! Now, Matt really does date Heather Glenn in the comics, though the television version bears almost no resemblance to her comic counterpart. However, given that there have been hints that Marvel may be adding other characters from the Netflix shows to the MCU, it’s worth noting that Heather had some run-ins with the Purple Man, a.k.a. Kilgrave from Jessica Jones. And it’s also worth noting that if/when things don’t work out with Heather, Matt also had a comics-canon relationship with Kirsten McDuffie. They’re really stacking the deck in this show.

Meanwhile, I’ll just be over here waiting for any acknowledgment of the MCU-canonical tryst between Matt and She-Hulk because that was the version of Daredevil I was hoping to see in this show! Will Tatiana Maslany make an appearance this season? Will the MCU ever acknowledge that She-Hulk is a show that happened? It’s true! Look it up, you can watch it!